Not your garden variety community farm in Newton

For the Newton Community Farm, growing season isn’t restricted to just spring, summer and fall anymore.

Chloe Gotsis

For the Newton Community Farm, growing season isn’t restricted to just spring, summer and fall anymore.

With a new hoop house, also called a high tunnel green house, farm managers Megan Talley and Joshua Faller can harvest vegetables all year long. The hoop house, which the farm received from a grant, will allow the farm to grow colder weather crops like kale, lettuce, and spinach during the winter season.

The plastic walled high-tunnel green house will also allow farmers at Newton’s only farm to keep its farm stand open longer each year, Talley and Faller said. Newton Community Farm’s farm stand currently runs from mid-May through Thanksgiving, Faller said.

“It’ll be more revenue for us if we can keep the farm stand open longer,” Talley said, adding that the green house may eventually allow them to partner with other winter farm stands in the area.

Talley and Faller put the green house up in November from a kit. They said the crops they’ve grown in it so far – spinach, lettuce and broccoli – have been a trial. But Faller said he expects it to be full of crops in the spring.

“We’ll probably be able to plant our tomatoes four to six weeks earlier and give them the heat they need. And they’ll be delicious,” he said. “We can start things earlier and maintain things longer. We’ll be able to plant these cold weather crops, which are so high in demand now.”

The green house shelters crops from the winter elements. Faller said the temperature inside the green house rose to 90 degrees, almost 60 degrees warmer than the 30-degree temperatures outside.

The hoop house is built on a track, allowing the farmers to move it over different crop beds.

Faller and Talley said the farm may eventually look at extending its 22-week Community Supported Agriculture program, where the farm allows people to buy a share of its produce and receive fresh grown produce each week. The farm currently has 130 members that it sells to during its CSA season, which runs from June through October.

Faller and Talley are also hoping that the green house will serve as a larger example of what people can do in their own home during the winter.

“We are an education farm and that’s part of the goal too is showing people that you can grow stuff all year long,” she said.

The state’s commissioner of agriculture Scott Soares said farms around the state are looking to expand their harvest seasons year-round.

“We have over 100 high tunnel greenhouses that have been installed across the state to really extend the growing season,” he said.

Soares said there are currently 37 winter farmers’ markets around the state, which is triple the number there were three years ago. He attributes the boom to consumers looking to buy locally grown products.

“The other thing we’ve seen is the emergence of cold storage facilities that allow growers to effectively store winter crops and root crops,” he said.

Staff writer Chloe Gotsis can be reached at 781-433-8333 or at cgotsis@wickedlocal.com